Caught Her In Some Old Dude’s Bedroom

Bee Wise LLC is a beekeeping supply company in Oklahoma. You can visit their web site at www.beewisellc.com or you can find them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/beewisellc. Thanks for the Intro Travis.

Once in a while we get a bee hive removal that turns into a real challenge. This was one that would have gone a little easier if we’d been able to just cut the ceiling but at the start we had no access to the downstairs apartment and we knew that another beekeeper had removed a hive from the same wall through the exterior a year or two previous. After digging in we determined that the other beekeeper likely didn’t remove the entire hive and he didn’t completely seal all access to the hive area. To be fair the build style and condition of the building made it very difficult to seal the siding completely and as you saw accessing the hive was tough at best. I didn’t completely seal the siding either when I rebuilt it as the property was being sold and was likely going to be torn down. Leaving the space of an old honey bee hive like this unsealed will allow other nearby honey bee colonies to rob any honey, pollen and wax left behind. If there are other nearby colonies, which I believe there are, there will be enough activity that it may appear as if there is still a hive here until they are done robbing everything worth having. Yellow jackets, roaches and other critters will also be in on the action. There is virtually no danger of another hive moving in here until at least March at which time the building may no longer be there.

The place was a ghost town most of the time I was there. It was foggy and quiet with no neighbors around that I could see and I set the alarm off in the down stairs apartment twice. I just knew the cops were going to bust in and put me in cuffs. I was thankful for the company and help of my brother on the second day. If he hadn’t been able to reach what he did I would have had to cut ceiling and the walls in the bedroom. He quit after a sting to his eye lid.

These bees were a little irritable with the weather being what it was. It was warm enough but the fog seemed to make them easy to anger. It was in the high 60’s the day’s we worked on them.

There was a good bit of honey which my nephew declined to sample since it was next to “some old guy’s bathroom”. That’s where the video title came from since I caught the queen in the bedroom ceiling.

I get a lot of questions from people interested in doing these removals just to get bees. I’d say if you have no construction experience just buy your bees. For the time I spent on this I could have just worked my job and bought two or three nice nuc hives without all the headache.